Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, Infoaxe is a provider of Flipora, a personalized search and discovery engine that allows users to choose topics, follow people, and discover websites. Founded in 2007, the firm has received funding of $3.90 million.

One of my professors at Stanford, Andy Rachleff used to say that in Entrepreneurship (and with picking investments as a Venture Capitalist) it is important to be a contrarian and correct, to be successful. So it is probably a lot more valuable to try to predict where the Industry is likely headed based on some early indicators. Below is one obvious and one not so obvious trend.

Mobile:

At Flipora, almost 50 percent of the new users signing up in the US, are doing so via mobile. This has been a remarkable change in a relatively short period of time. As a thought experiment, it is helpful to ask yourself, what was the last successful consumer internet company that launched on the desktop first? You will have to think hard.

Personalization:

We are about to enter a future of extreme personalization where intelligent sensors collect data, that is processed in the cloud with machine learning and data mining algorithms to offer highly personalized services. Siri, Google Now, Nest, Flipora etc. are early steps in this direction.

The Rise of Consumer Applications that have machine learning/Artificial Intelligence Front and Center

Historically, machine learning has been this invisible hand that has vastly improved several products and services in the background. Be it reading zip codes, detecting email spam, detecting cancer, improving search relevance, machine translation, better ad targeting etc. Of late we are seeing the rise of consumer applications that have machine learning & A.I. more front & center. Siri, Google Now, Nest, Self driving cars etc. are all examples. This is due to some fundamental advancements in learning algorithms, computational costs dropping as a result of Moore's law as well as the public perception of applications of A.I. slowly evolving. Services like Siri and Google Now (and Microsoft's Cortana) aim to offer intelligent assistants that show you what you will be interested in or would find useful, before you would know to look or ask for it. For instance, showing your traffic information for the route that you are about to take and checking if your flight is delayed.

Adapting to a Mobile Centric World and How to think about Competition

Firstly, for entrepreneurs building consumer internet products, adapting to the growing platform shift from the desktop to the smartphone is going to be important, particularly if the initial product was conceived of and built primarily as a Web first service. It requires a deep rethinking of a lot of assumptions that went into the product and how it was designed to be used. Also, getting discovered organically becomes a challenge due to the reliance on the app stores on iOS & Android for distribution. Aside from the few breakout app hits, no one has cracked the mobile distribution nut yet. In the noisy world we live in, where users are inundated by apps all day, how do you stand out?

Secondly, I also think it is important to frame how one thinks about competition very carefully. It is very tempting to fixate on a competitor that's nearest to you in feature space but that is very dangerous and largely useless. The reality is that there are >2.5 billion internet users in the world today and most of them have likely neither heard about you or the other startup that's similar to you. There are two true competitors to think about. Firstly, it is apathy or the back button in the browser. We live in a very noisy and connected world, where a user is constantly getting hit by multiple apps, notifications from friends etc. If you could magically teleport a user to your product, how can you capture their imagination in under five seconds before they get bored/distracted and wander away? How do you stand out? The bar is insanely high. Secondly, if you want to think about competitors, think about the basic human need/emotion that you're appealing to and see how people address that need on the Web today. Are you looking to entertain? inform? solve loneliness? For example, if your product at a very broad level, helps entertain users then it is important to put yourself in the shoes of a casual user who is perhaps not even in the technology industry. Maybe she's a librarian and she has 10 minutes to kill, while at work in front of a computer or on her phone. What does she do today? Probably check Facebook, Twitter, go on Youtube etc. Your product has to displace that behavior. THAT is the bar. That's the bar for Flipora too.( As told to Sagaya Christuraj)